A. Homes - Things You Should Know

“How was work?” There is relief in other people’s tragedies.

“Interesting,” she says, pulling the meat out of the broiler. She slices open the steak, blood runs out.

“How does that look?”

“Perfect.” I smile, grating the Parmesan.

“A guy came in this afternoon, high on something. He’d tried to take his face off, literally — took a knife and peeled it.”

“How did you put him back together?”

“A thousand stitches and surgical glue. Another man lost his right hand. Fortunately, he’s a lefty.”

We sit at the kitchen table talking about severed limbs, thin threads of ligaments, the delicate weave of nerves — reattachment, the hope of regaining full function. Miracles.

“I love you,” she says, leaning over, kissing my forehead.

“How can you say that?”

“Because I do?”

“You don’t love me enough.”

“Nothing is enough,” she says. And it is true, excruciatingly true.

I want to tell her I am having an affair, I want to make her leave, I want to prove that she doesn’t love me enough. I want to have it over with.

“I’m having an affair,” I tell her.

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am. I’m fucking Sally Baumgarten.”

She laughs. “And I’m giving blowjobs to Tom.”

“My friend Tom?”

“You bet.”

She could be, she very well could be. I pour Cascade into the dishwasher and push the button — Heavy Soil.

“I’m leaving,” I tell her.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“When will you be back?”

“Never. I’m not coming back.”

“Then you’re not leaving,” she says.

“I hate you.”

I married her before I loved her. For our honeymoon, we went to California. She was thinking Disneyland, Carmel, Big Sur, a driving trip up the coast — fun. I was hoping for an earthquake, brush fire, mudslide — disaster.

In the hotel room in Los Angeles I panicked. A wall of glass, a broad expanse of windows looking out over the city — it was a surprisingly clear night. The lights in the hills twinkled, beckoned. Without warning, I ran toward the glass, hurling myself forward.

She took me down, tackling me. She sat on top, pinning me, her one hundred nineteen pounds on my one fifty-six — she’s stronger than you think.

“If you do that again I won’t forgive you.”

The intimacy, the unbearable intimacy is what’s most mortifying — when they know the habits of your bowels, your cheapnesses, your horribleness, when they know things about you that no one should know, things you don’t even know about yourself.

She knows these things and doesn’t say it’s too much, too weird, too fucked up. “It’s my training,” she says. “My shift doesn’t end just because something bad happens.”

It is about love. It is about getting enough, having enough, drowning in it, and now it is too late. I am permanently malnourished — there isn’t enough love in the world.

There is a danger in this, in writing this, in saying this. I am putting myself on the line. If I am found floating, face down, there will be theories, lingering questions. Did he mean it? Was it an accident — is there any such thing as an accident, is fate that forgiving? Was this letter a warning, a true story? Everything is suspect. (Unless otherwise instructed — if something happens, give me the benefit of the doubt.)

“What would it be like if you gave it up?” she asked.

I am incredulous.

“If you abandoned the idea? Aren’t you bored by it all after all these years; why not just give it up?”

“Wanting to be dead is as natural to me as breathing.”

What would I be without it? I don’t know that I could handle it. Like being sprung from a lifetime jail, like Jack Henry Abbot, I might wheel around and stab someone with a dinner knife.

And what if I truly gave it up, if I said, yes it is a beautiful day, yes I am incredibly lucky — one of the luckiest men in the world. What if I admitted it, you are my best friend, my favorite fuck, my cure. What if I say I love you and she says it’s over. What if that’s part of the game, the dance? I will have missed my moment, I will be shit out of luck — stuck here forever.

“Why do you put up with it?”

“Because this is not you,” she says. “It’s part of you, but it’s not you. Are you still going to kill yourself?”

“Yes,” I say. Yes I am, to prove I am independent, to prove I still can. “I hate you,” I tell her. “I hate you so much.”

“I know,” she says.

My wife is not without complications of her own. She keeps a baseball bat under her side of the bed. I discovered it by accident — one day it rolled out from under. Louisville Slugger. I rolled it back into place and have never let on that I know it’s there. Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night, sits straight up, and screams, “Who’s there? Who is in the waiting room?” She stops for a second and starts again, annoyed. “I don’t have all day. Next. Bring the next one in.” There are nights I watch her sleep, her face a naive dissolve, tension erased, her delicate blond lashes, her lips, soft like a child’s, and I want to punch her. I want to bash her face in. I wonder what she would do then.

“A thought is only a thought,” she says when I wake her.

And then she tells me her dreams. “I was a man and I was having sex with another man and you were there, you were wearing a white skirt, and then someone came in but he didn’t have any arms and I kept wondering how did he open the door?”

“Let’s go back to sleep for a little while.”

I am getting closer. The situation is untenable, something has to happen. I have lived this way for a long time, there is a cumulative effect, a worsening. I am embarrassed that I have let it go on for so long.

I know how I will do it. I will hang myself. Right here at home. I have known it since we bought the house. When the real estate agent went on and on about the location, the yard, the school district, I was thinking about the interior — the exposed rafters, the beams. The dead man’s walk to the top of the stairs.

We are cleaning up. I wipe the table with a sponge.

“What’s in the bag,” she says, pointing to something on the counter.

“Rope.” I stopped on the way home. I ran the errand.

“Let’s go to the movies,” she says, tying up the trash. She hands me the bag. “Take it outside,” she says, sending me into the night.

The yard is flooded with light, extra lights, like searchlights, lights so bright that when raccoons cross to get to the trash, they hold their paws up over their eyes, shielding them.

I feel her watching me from the kitchen window.

We go to see The Armageddon Complex, a disaster film with a tidal wave, a tornado, a fire, a global-warming theme. Among the special effects are that the temperature in the theater changes from 55 to 90 degrees during the film— You freeze, you cook, you wish you’d planned ahead.

The popcorn is oversalted. Before the tidal wave hits, I am panting with thirst. “Water,” I whisper, climbing over her into the aisle.

She pulls me back into my seat. “Don’t go.”

At key moments, she covers her eyes and waits until I squeeze her free hand to give her the all clear.

We are in the car on the way home. She is driving. The night is black. We move through the depths of darkness — the thin yellow line, the pathway home, unfolds before us. There is the hum of the engine, the steadiness of her foot on the gas.

“We have to talk,” I tell her.

“We talk constantly. We never stop talking.”

“There’s something I need to…” I say, not finishing the thought.